Theater

Sum up the state of theater in Dallas? First you have to find time to see it all- and that fact alone tells us something that wasn’t always true: Dallas wants theater and there are people here who can give it to us. Beyond quantity, the plump ’85-’86 lineup is also lively and impressive, heavy on contemporary American plays, well-balanced by comedies, dramas and musicals and speckled with a few of the kind of bold, risky works that can actually change the art of theater itself.

“Looking at what plays are being done at New Arts, the Theater Center and Stage #1,I think it’s an exciting season,” says Dale AJ Rose, a veteran Dallas director who has worked at many theaters in town, most recently Stage #1, where he directed The Miss Firecracker Contest. “One could dream of a season like this three years ago, but it couldn’t have been a reality.” Rose believes that the bounty of new works is a welcome one-sidedness because contemporary theater has been more or less neglected here save for Stage #l’s vanguard monopoly on the field of contemporary American plays. “It’s a more contemporary season all around,” he says. “And in a sense it’s balanced because it was time to have more contemporary theater. We can go back later and embrace the classics.”

There’s reason to believe that the quality of productions this season will be high, the effect of a steadily deepening pool of talented directors, actors and designers who have been waiting for support from the community-support that is slowly but tangibly growing. The “professionalism” factor is further increasing because more than ever the theaters are having to compete for patrons. And as long as the overall number of theatergoers in the city increases, everyone will benefit from the competition.

If theater in Dallas is taking flight, it’s doing so after several false starts. Three years ago there was particular anticipation fueled by the artistic success of Stage #1, new directions at New Arts and the renovation of several theaters, including the Majestic. Unfortunately, the hopeful talk was not matched by ticket sales, and the directors and administrators who had been the bravest began to back-pedal for fear of losing even more money. The Plaza Theatre in University Park, which had been the great hope in the fall of ’83 with its promise to produce quality plays and import nationally prominent productions, faltered for lack of audience and funds. Stage #1, was running in the red and responded by adding to its play list more upbeat, “safer” works. Around town quality remained high, but momentum had turned into inertia.



the excitement surged again with the entrance of Adrian Hall as artistic director of the Theater Center and his plans for turning Dallas’ oldest professional theater company into a fine regional theater, on a par with such respected institutions as the Guthrie in Minneapolis and Hall’s own Trinity Square Repertory Company in Providence, Rhode Island. Hall has revitalized DTC with superior productions and a creative vision, so much so that the image of DTC’s former limp self is all but erased. The hype surrounding the Theater Center’s renaissance began to blur the big picture (some expected Hall to walk on water), but now it’s easier to see the Theater Center’s place in the overall configuration: that is, prominent but not imperial.

It’s too bad that all the noise about the Theater Center has muted the triumph of Stage #1. Making do with about as much money as the Theater Center trims from its own fat budget proposals, Stage #1 has introduced Dallas to the major contemporary playwrights like Marsha Norman and Sam Shepard, and has done so with top-notch acting, innovative directing and out-right defiance of Dallas’ squeamishness. Stage #1 was started in the fall of 1979 by its artistic director Jack Clay, head of SMU’s much-touted acting program, as a showplace for contemporary American plays and a venue for SMU-produced talent. Clay opened that first season with Lanford Wilson’s Fifth of July, long before Broadway audiences and the world had heard of it. The second play that season was the puzzling, menacing Buried Child by Sam Shepard, who was then mostly unknown outside the theater community; today, many consider Shepard the American theater’s greatest modern voice. The strong and good works continued at Stage #1, highlighted by such eye-opening productions as David Mamet’s American Buffalo and Martin Sherman’s Bent. Several financially rough seasons suggested that Dallas still wasn’t ready to support that kind of theater, but Stage #1 is balancing its budget now and seems to be back on track.

Of course, Stage #l’s 97-seat home, the Greenville Avenue Theatre, is easier to fill than the other theaters in town, but the public’s response to Stage #1 is significant beyond the relatively limited number of people who have seen shows there. Stage #1 primed Dallas, particularly patrons who donate money, for serious theater, allowing other theaters and artistic directors, like Hall, to proceed.

Hall’s first two seasons at the Theater Center represented a grab bag of classics, recent successes (like Amadeus) and new works. Investing the seasons with musicals, a hefty dose of frivolity and some peculiar experimentation kept the Theater Center at the very least full of surprises. Most productions were very good, and several, such as last season’s Passion Play by Peter Nichols, could hold their own anywhere. The critics applauded and audiences did, too.

Still, there are problems. Two of the best productions staged at the Theater Center-Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine and Shepard’s Fool for Love-elicited complaints from offended theatergoers who objected to both language and subjects. Some of those complaints were followed by canceled season subscriptions. “I’ve been disappointed in people’s outrage at plays that I thought were very fine works,” says Hall. He and his crew had expected to lose some devotees of the old Theater Center, which had coddled its audience by avoiding strong language and more mature, darker themes, but he also expected to build up more of a subscription base.

“I’m confused,” says Hall, “why there aren’t more people willing to commit to a subscription. Other large cities have subscription audiences of 20,000. We struggle to get just a few thousand. I really don’t understand that.” As no theater in Dallas has proven itself foolproof, perhaps patrons want to hear acclaim before they shell out the money for tickets. Also, Dallas is not yet in the habit of steady theatergoing, a fact Hall wants to change. “A large section of the population,” he says, “needs to get addicted.”

Hall thinks the current audiences at the Theater Center are too homogenous. “I think the audience shouldn’t be so well-dressed and orderly,” he says. “I’d like to see some hippies mixed in with the black ties.” Hall is especially excited about a recent corporate grant that will allow thousands of school children to attend plays for free.

The theater to watch most carefully this year is New Arts, in the West End, which has spent recent years playing catch-up. Its new artistic director, Stephen Hollis, has scheduled an intelligent, relevant and provocative hodgepodge of plays by British and American writers, including a recent work by British playwright Michael Frayn, who wrote the clever Noises Off that was brought to town by the Majestic Broadway Series last month. Like Hall, Hollis hopes audiences will come to trust his theater. “A theater should be like a good restaurant,” he says, “so that you’ll sample a new dish even if you’ve never heard of it.” Hollis didn’t pick this season’s plays based on what audiences are accustomed to. “I’m not fond of safe theater,” he says. “I think theater is able to stimulate and enlighten. I’m passionate about the shows we’re doing. I selected the plays on the basis of their theatrical muscle power.”

Hollis is a new arrival to Dallas, coming from a distinguished directing career in New York and his native England. He thinks Dallas is challenging but holds much potential. “My perception is that Dallas has an eager audience for good theater,” he says.

If so, they will have a full bill of fare this season. A sampling:

Stage #1 is tackling a string of four new American plays never seen in Dallas, including a “comic fantasia” by Eric Over-myer, who wrote the ingenious, dreamlike Native Speech that enlivened Stage #l’s 50-50 season last year; and a serious drama about a black slave who joins Sam Houston’s army-a piece commissioned by Stage #\ to celebrate the Texas Sesquicentennial.

Theatre Three, which began its season early last summer and introduced Dallas audiences to two impressive works-Painting Churches and A… My Name Is Alice-has its hands on two more hot properties: Home Front, former Dallasite James Duff’s play about a Vietnam veteran and his tense life with his family, which comes from a successful New York run; and Season’s Greetings, a Christmas comedy of manners by acclaimed British playwright Alan Ayck-bourn, recently premiered by the Alley Theatre in Houston.

The Theater Center has scheduled an ail-American season that opened in September with a world premiere musical by the award-winning black writer/composer Vinnette Carol. Thornton Wilder’s classic The Skin of Our Teeth opens at the Theater Center this month. Two likely DTC highlights: Christopher Durang’s outrageous, bitter comedy, The Marriage of Bette and Boo, and Hall’s own adaptation of Native Son, a play about racial prejudice.

New Arts will present Caryl Churchill’s highly praised Top Girls, wherein a handful of famous women from various places in history meet for lunch in a modern-day restaurant, as well as two challenging shows that have a particular relevance these days: Extremities, which raises questions about a person’s right to dispense “justice” to a rapist or attacker, and Master Harold.. .and the boys, a brilliant play about the plight of blacks in South Africa. (A very fine touring company of Master Harold failed to get an audience two years ago at the Plaza Theatre, due at least in part to the wealthy WASP character of that theater’s supporters, so the response to New Arts’ production will be a truer measure of Dallas’ willingness to confront such theater.)

The Majestic Broadway Series and Dallas Repertory Theatre will regale the city with the big-name musicals and hit plays whose posters are either still dominating Shubert Alley or are but a layer or two under fresher paint, the former bringing in national touring companies to the Majestic Theatre downtown, the latter scaling down shows as seemingly unshrinkable as Evita and A Chorus Line for its cozy NorthPark theater.

A score of community theaters and colleges will likely take a few chances that the professional directors would envy, and the handful of avant-garde and garage theaters, particularly those struggling to life in the artists’ enclave of Deep Ellum, should enhance an already well-seasoned season.

Half of the long haul to making Dallas a lively, strong theater town involves the kind of gutsiness that Hall and Hollis share. But the passage also requires an enthusiastic audience that understands why it came to the theater in the first place. Norma Young, Theatre Three’s artistic director who has watched theater in Dallas develop over three decades, sees positive signs of maturity. “Playgoers are going for the play more, as opposed to ’going to the theater’ because they think they should,” she says.

Says Rose: “Dallas audiences are no longer embracing a work just because Houston did it or New York did it.”

Young’s Theatre Three is emblematic of Dallas’ theater growth. Theatre Three steadily built a following by offering a wide variety of shows and by nurturing an audience as a family. In recent years, the theater has been thought of as a second string company behind DTC, New Arts and Stage #1 because the work was-and to a degree still is- generally lighter, more nostalgic, less startling. Theatre Three has made a low-key but significant transition in the last five years, however, that should serve as an example to the general theater community. It has adapted both to the desires of its large number of subscribers and to the changing times, with plays like Durang’s controversial Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You, the biggest selling show in the theater’s history, which got an extended run followed by a repeat performance. “I’m not a purist,” says Young. “I don’t think a theater should be asked to do only certain things-say classics, or new plays, or musicals. I believe theater is an art of plurality. And there’s always room for more audience.”

If the quality of theater in Dallas variesfrom group to group, from show to show, sobe it. The Dallas Theater Center isn’t goingto single-handedly save theater in this town,nor should it. A community rich with theateris a community rich with theaters, not spellbound by one bright star. Happily, Dallastheaters are competing with and complementing one another. True, that’s due in partto Adrian Hall’s aggressive direction at DTC.If he can feel the others biting at his heels,he should be proud.

HOT

TICKET



●　NOISES OFF, MAJESTIC THEATRE, THROUGH NOV. 10, (787-2000). Michael Frayn’s hilarious send-up of the theater.

●　THE SKIN OF OUR TEETH, THE DALLAS THEATER CENTER’S FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT THEATER, NOV. 14-DEC. 15, (526-8857). Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-unnning fable about a family with unusual stamina.

●　SEASON’S GREETINGS, ATTHEATRE THREE, DEC. 10-JAN. 9,(871-3300). A new arrival fromBritain’s always-funny AlanAyckbourn.

●　EXTREMITIES, AT NEW ARTS THEATRE, JAN. 16-FEB 16, (761-9064). The end of the first act of this frightening drama about a woman and her attacker presents a seemingly perfect dilemma.

●　ON THE VERGE, AT STAGE #1, GREENVILLE AVENUE THEATRE, JAN. 29-FEB. 23, (824-2552). A new play by the poetic Eric Over-myer, who wrote last year’s bizarre, entrancing Native Speech.

●　THE MARRIAGE OF BETTE AND BOO, THE DALLAS THEATER CENTER’S FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT THEATER, JAN. 14-FEB. 9, (526-8857). Christopher Durang’s latest swipe at sacred social institutions. A comedy, of course.

●　CRIMES OF THE HEART, AT DALLAS REPERTORY THEATRE, MAR. 27-APR. 20, (369-8966). A return to Dallas of Beth Henley’s popular comedy about three slightly weird sisters in Mississippi.

●　MASTER HAROLD…AND THE BOYS, AT NEW ARTS THEATRE, APR. 10-MAY 10, (761-9064). A fine, poignant play about a white boy in South Africa who wakes up to his apartheid legacy.

●　BlLOXI BLUES, AT THE MAJESTICTHEATRE, MAY 13-25, (787-2000).This won the 1985 Tony awardfor Best Play on Broadway. It’sNeil Simon’s sequal to the equallypopular Brighton Beach Memoir

●　TOP GIRLS, AT NEW ARTS THEATRE, MAY 22-JUNE 22, (761-9064). Some of history’s “lop girls” get together for a provocative modern-day chat.